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Colloquia Archive

Affecting Behavior: Roles of Affect in Interactions among Situated Embodied Agents

September 19, 2008

Abstract

Affect is deeply intertwined with the cognitive architectures of humans and other animals. Affective states like happiness, fear, anger, and disappointment routinely accompany cognitive processes, influencing attention, problem solving, action selection, and social interactions. This talk presents an overview of Matthias Scheutz's work on the possible roles of affect in embodied agents that are situated in cooperative and competitive multiagent environments. He will show that affective states can have useful roles both in deciding what to do next and in displaying agent-internal states that indicate the agent's behavioral dispositions. Prof. Scheutz will draw examples from agent-based simulation models in biologically motivated competitive multiagent environments, where agents compete for limited resources to survive and procreate, and from complex robotic architectures for human-robot interaction, where humans need to work with autonomous robots in teams to jointly achieve a task. The latter is of particular relevance to the emerging field of human-robot interaction (HRI) where models of human cognition and behavior can help in the design of robots that will be able to interact with humans in natural ways.

Biography

Matthias Scheutz received degrees in philosophy (M.A., 1989; Ph.D., 1995) and formal logic (M.S., 1993) from the University of Vienna and in computer engineering (M.S., 1993) from the Vienna University of Technology in Austria.  He also received a joint Ph.D. (1999) in cognitive science and computer science from Indiana University, Bloomington. Prof. Scheutz is currently an associate professor of cognitive science, computer science, and informatics in the Cognitive Science Program and the School of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington.  He held prior faculty and research positions at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Birmingham (UK), and the University of Vienna (Austria).  Prof. Scheutz has over 100 peer-reviewed publications in artificial intelligence, robotics, artificial life, agent-based computing, cognitive modeling, and foundations of cognitive science. His current research and teaching interests include multiscale agent-based models of social behavior and complex cognitive and affective robots for human-robot interaction.